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I recently upgraded my machine to Ubuntu 11.04, but I still want to be able to convert my movies for my iPod. HandBrake is a nice little tool that will allow you to do just that. At the time of this writing these instructions would work for ubuntu 9.10 – 10.04.

I purchased a second AVS HA-IR01SV Remote from newegg for my new Zotac Zbox. I plugged this into my freshly installed XBMC Live 10.0 Zbox setup, and the thing wouldn’t work. The light in the receiver would light up red, and just stay lit up. I sent the first remote back because it didn’t work, and the original one that I had bought worked fine. They sent me a new one, and it didn’t work either.

This time I happened to plug it into my laptop and ran XBMC. The remote worked fine. After looking into the problem I noticed that my Laptop was running version 0.8.7-pre3 of lircd and irw. It showed it was running version 0.8.6 on my Zotac Zbox when the following commands were run.

lircd -v
irw -v

lircd -v
irw -v

FYI: you can switch from the XBMC interface to a terminal by pressing alt+ctrl+f2. You can switch back by pressing alt+ctrl+f7. Obviously there are more terminals for f3, f4, f5 and f6.

Apparently the problem is that the new remote is a little bit different, and registers itself a little bit differently. When ‘lsusb’ was run it returned the following:

You need to exit and save the file. Then you’ll stop LIRC and reconfigure it.

sudo/etc/init.d/lirc stop
sudo dpkg-reconfigure lirc-modules-source

sudo /etc/init.d/lirc stop
sudo dpkg-reconfigure lirc-modules-source

After that you can restart LIRC and test it out with irw.

sudo/etc/init.d/lirc restart
irw

sudo /etc/init.d/lirc restart
irw

When you run irw you should be able to push the buttons on the remote, and it should give you some feedback on the screen about which button you pushed. Hopefully that’s all that you really need.

If that doesn’t work then you may want to read through this other post that shows a different way to do the same thing. I actually went through both of these, because I tried one and then the other, but I had both IR receivers plugged in but I was only pointing the remote into the new receiver, but it wasn’t working because LIRC was trying to use the original receiver. So it may have really been the second way that got it tor work. Please let me know if this work for you or not. If you run across any steps that are missing please post a comment to help others out.

I have an Acer Revo AR-1600 with XBMC running on it hooked to a different TV. It worked so good I thought I’d do a similar setup for a second TV. The difference this time is that it’s in a room that doesn’t have CAT5 run to it, so I wanted a box with WiFi built in. I selected the following items, and purchased them from newegg. The remote is the same remote as I am using with me Revo. I decided to get the same one again because it works great.

Zotac ZBOX HD-ID11-U

Newegg Item #: N82E16856173005

Price: $249.99

AVS Gear HA-IR01SV MCE VISTA Remote Control

Newegg Item #: N82E16880121001

Price: $21.20

Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD2500BEVT 250GB 5400 RPM 2.5″ HDD

Newegg Item #: N82E16822136387

Price: $46.99 (Free with Zotac)

CORSAIR VS2GSDS667D2 2GB 200-Pin DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) Memory

Newegg Item #: N82E16820145172

Price: $29.99 (Free with Zotac)

Total Cost: $271.19

I’m actually not using the WD HDD for my XBMC box. Instead I had a 4GB flash drive laying around that I installed XBMC on. This way I can put the WD HDD in an external case and use it as a portable hard drive to take with my laptop.

Getting suspend to work

A Source said that they inserted the USB Mouse and Keyboard on the back USB Ports, they two, that are farthest from the eSata, also resume from S3. The other two, by the eSata, don’t resume from S3. The front USB port resumes form S3 as well.

I simply enabled all the usb ports, that can, to resume from S3, this way if I moved the IR receiver then it would still work. You can try them from the command line with the following:

Obviously if you figured out which USB you needed before, then you really only need to add the one. You may want to try the command ‘lsusb’ it may give you some insight as to which USB to use. When in run lsusb it gives me:

When I installed XBMC 9.11 on my Acer Revo AR-1600 I had a problem with getting the audio working over the HMDI. It appears that the fix is to a a new file .asoundrc in the xbmc users home directory. SSH into the machine and type the following:

touch ~/.asoundrc
nano ~/.asoundrc

touch ~/.asoundrc
nano ~/.asoundrc

When the nano editor open up the .asoundrc file enter the following into the file:

pcm.!default {
type plug
slave {
pcm "hdmi"
}
}

Press ctrl+x to exit, followed by y to save the changes. Then the only thing remaining is to fix the settings in xbmc itself. Load xbmc and go into the audio settings and set the following.

I’ve been running a version of XBMC live on my Acer Revo AR-1600 for a while now, and today I tried to start it up, and got the following message.

Mount of filesystem failed.
A maintenance shell will now be started.
CONTROL-D will terminate this shell and re-try.
* Starting init crypto disks... [ OK ]

After a quick google, I ran across an xbmc forum post. It suggested it would start after fsck was run.

sudo fsck
sudo shutdown -r now

sudo fsck
sudo shutdown -r now

When I did this it started fine on the reboot. Now I’m curious if I’m going to be having problems on the next reboot. If I do, I’ll probably upgrade to XBMC 10.0 (Dharma). I have a Zotac ZBOXHD-ID11-U showing up tomorrow for another room. I’d actually like to get those running off the same database, and it’d make sense to get them running off the same XBMC version as well.

When I first started using CouchPotato I saw a few screen shots people had on the internet with multiple qualities selected. I never could figure it out until now.

You need to go to your CouchPotato page, and go to Settings >> Quality, and there you will find a link that says

Create a new custom quality

You will then need to do the following:

Give it a name, e.g. BR/DVD-Rip

Select days to allow a better version to be downloaded

Finally add the qualities that you would allow

Personally I like either DVD-Rip or BR-Rip with the later being preferred. After you save that you can go back into Settings >> Quality, and you can select your new custom quality as the default.

If you hover over the Finish heading in the custom quality it says the following:

Won’t download anything else if it has found this quality.”

I left the BR-Rip checked, and unchecked the DVD-Rip. We’ll see what this does, but it seems to me that it should allow keep looking for a BR-Rip even if a DVD-Rip has been found and downloaded, but if it has found a BR-Rip, then it won’t look any more for a DVD-Rip.

I ran into a neat little program called CouchPotato. It is used for downloading movies off the internet. It works with either nzb or torrent files. Once you have it installed you can search for movies that you would like, and add them to your want list. When you add it to the want list you also specify the quality that you would like the movie to be. There are options to have it rename the files and put them in a different directory. Read more…

I’ve been using the XBMC Web Server HTTP API, to send commands to my XBMC installations. The API is not enabled by default, so you’ll have to get into the settings and enable it. In XBMC you will need to verify your settings.

System > Settings > Network > Services

There you will have to enable Allow control of XBMC via HTTP.

Set and note the Port

Set and note the Username

Set and note the Password

Note: you’ll have to do this for each User on the XBMC machine, and on each separate XBMC machine.

For more information about the HTTP API visit the xbmc.org. It appears that the HTTP API is going to be depreciated in the next version of XBMC (Dharma).

I have been using XBMC for quite a while. Actually it was one of the main reasons that I got the original xbox. It’s quite a spectacular piece of software, especially being freeware. The other bit of technology that I have been enjoying lately is my HTC Hero, which is an Android power phone. Read more…

I always got frustrated when I tried running XBMC on my ubuntu laptop and forgot to turn off the screensaver. Finally I found some information about how to solve this problem here.

The solution is to create a bash script that disables the screensaver and the power management, then it runs XBMC and when it’s complete it will re-enable the screensaver and power management. Read more…